While clearing out old papers from my files, I came across excerpts of remarks made by Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn at his address to the Harvard University Graduating Class of 1978. These were published on page 8 A of The Philadelphia Inquirer, on Wednesday, June 14, 1978. Here are a few of them:
“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature
which an outside observer notices in the West in our days”.
“I have spent all my life under a communist regime, and I
will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible
one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite
worthy of man either”.
“We have placed too much hope in political and social
reforms, only to find out that we are being deprived of our most precious
possession: our spiritual life”.
“Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of
the 20th century and more
than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press”.
What will he say now about 24 – hour news cycles, spreading
of dangerous misinformation in the social media and our response to the
pandemic?
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